Hi folks, I’m having difficulties with the following issue and wonder whether someone could give me some advice on how to proceed.
I have an object containing hundreds of blue taxiway (blue) edge lights for an airport apron (all identical), which I would like to replace with another model of mine. I know how to do this manually, but that would be a tedious work for the major airport I am currently working on. I have tried to make a component of the new model and of one of the many hundred lights already included in this object, however, when I select this component Sketchup doesn’t seem to recognise all the other hundreds of lights as similar components. I can therefore only change the component I indicated with the new model of my choice.
I have imported both the object with the hundreds of lights and the new model using the X-Plane to sketchup import model, if that would make any difference.
Is there a way to get this done with a few clicks, instead of spending several hours manually swapping those lights, either natively or with the use of extensions?
On the screenshot you can see the new object (with included light effects) at the back, and one of the many hundred old lights in the front, which I would like to see replaced by the new one. And in the background the many other lights which I would like to replace with a few clicks. (if possible)
Select the components in the model or right click on the component’s thumbnail in the Components panel and choose Select Instances. Then right click on the new component in the Components panel and choose Replace selected.
Thank you for your reply, I just gave that a try, unfortunately, the “select instances” option is greyed out, unfortunately. It is only not greyed out if I select the one component that I individualise, but then only that one is selected and not the hundreds of other identical ones. How to solve that?
Look at Outliner. Your model has no components in the model space. You’ve exploded them all to loose geometry. It’s no wonder Select instances is grayed out since there are no instances. It’s going to be a lot of work to replace all of those with the light components.
From the state of the model you uploaded? I guess I would probably group all of the loose geometry into one big group and then start bringing in and distributing the light components. You should be able to use the existing geometry as references for locating them. When you get finished adding in all the lights, delete the big group.
Too bad you picked such a large airport. If you’d picked one with a single runway and one taxiway, it wouldn’t be as big of a job.
Yeah, if it were a small airport I would have done it myself, that’s why I was wondering whether it was possible to automate the process.
Not necessarily from the model I uploaded though, I could convert the base model into another format Sketchup accepts. Would that solve the problem of the loose geometry?
Loose to Groups - will select and convert your lights into groups.
Component Replacer - may be able to replace all of those groups all with a single component that has many instances.
There’s another extension in forget the name of (probably a Thom Thom extension) that can convert groups into components…you may not need that, but it does exist
I say May because in havent tested it (writing from my phone)…but that’s the solution I would try.
That seems like the trick, but I am noticing the following issue now: it splits the “head” of the lights - the blue part, and the yellow part as two distinctive groups. Is there any way to make sure each light turns into a group and subsequently by itself (not two parts, but one)?
Maybe explode them all to “loose” geometry then use Loose To Groups to turn them back into one group - but the two parts of the light need to be touching (connected) otherwise it’ll turn them back into two groups.
Ok, but that doesnt really matter because only one group is needed.The other can be deleted before using the Component Replacer function
I attached a ‘fixed file’ Fixed.skp (2.9 MB)
